Geneva: Announcing the Enhanced Crisis Management Demonstrator

Crossposted from ICT4Peace Site.
Ushahidi and the ICT4Peace Foundation have agreed to jointly develop an enhanced ICT4Peace Crisis Information Management Platform Demonstrator (CIMD), based on Ushahidi’s existing platform and as deployed e.g. in Libya including further upgrades such as the ‘Luanda’ version of the Ushahidi platform and based of specifications provided by ICT4Peace.
The new generation of crowd sourced crisis information management tools have made extraordinary progress in proving valuable information to decision makers in crisis, it is generally recognized, that further developments are needed to provide the necessary tools to validate information through assessing the reliability of the source and the probability of the occurrence. Several stakeholders have different ways of dealing with incoming data relating to a crisis and there is a need for ‘bounded’ crowdsourcing and ‘unbounded’ crowdsourcing. Bounded crowdsourcing entails the reporting of information from vetted sources and for that information to be available only to view by the ‘bound. The proposed ICT4Peace enhanced CIMD tool will feature the updated ‘Luanda’ Ushahidi platform with all its built in features and two key plugins.
The Matrix Analysis plugin as outlined on ICT4peace website and as provided on Ushahidi plugin repository.
For instance, multiple groups plugin for several separate “bound” and “non bound”-reporting reporting communities on the same platform. This keeps data centralized while allowing each of the groups to keep reports and messages private until they decide to make them public. This can allow for collaboration of different agencies that have varying levels of comfort with sharing data publicly.